Historically, prime-time television has devoted at least one-third of its programming to crime. The extreme popularity of crime shows continues unabated. From Law & Order to CSI, Americans are riveted by crime TV. Court TV and other cable channels produce true crime series, too, that take viewers through both current crimes and trials and cold cases. Yet, despite efforts in these shows to depict real investigative and legal techniques, chances are, viewers have questions about criminal procedure, legal issues, and related concerns. For instance, why do police get angry when a suspect just asks for a lawyer? Or, what's the difference between being an accomplice to a crime and being a conspirator? The Crime Junkie's Guide to Criminal Law is written specifically for the millions of crime junkies who make up the audiences for the variety of crime dramas, both real and fictional, that blaze across our screens night after night. The news media know that crime is inherently interesting because it involves things we all understand -- like passion, greed, revenge and the urge to make very close friends in prison. Television broadcasts and major magazines drip with salacious details about the infamous evildoings of the moment. From the sports to the style sections, newspaper headlines scream out reports of the latest celebrity picked up for one transgression or another. This one-of-a-kind book is an indispensable guide to criminal law that uses actual trials alongside plots and characters from popular television shows to illustrate criminal law issues like degrees of murder, the defense of intoxication, search warrants, insanity pleas, and the purposes of various pretrial hearings. Silver offersa concise, informative, and entertaining explanation of everything readers need to know to truly appreciate crime stories (real and fictional) and understand how criminal law really works.

Scoundrels and Shirkers examines the deep relationship between capitalism and poverty in England since the 12th century. It exposes the dynamics of capitalism, from its origins in the long transition from feudalism to its current crisis under neoliberal capitalism, in producing poverty. The book, unique in the historical breadth of its focus, shows conclusively that poverty is an inevitable consequence of capitalism. In the search for profits and control of society's economic surplus, capitalism expands, adapts and innovates, producing not only commodities and wealth but also, and necessarily, poverty. With the partial but important exception of the 1945-51 period, and to a lesser extent the time between 1906 and 1914, there has never been a serious attempt to solve poverty. Efforts have always been to manage and control the poor to prevent them from starving or rebelling; to punish and blame them for being poor; and to force them into poverty-level jobs. Any real solution would require the logic of capitalism to be deeply disrupted. While possible in theory, such a change will require massive social movements.

For a country as wealthy as Canada, poverty is utterly unnecessary. In About Canada: Poverty, Jim Silver illustrates that poverty is about more than a shortage of money: it is complex and multifaceted and can profoundly damage the human spirit. At the centre of this analysis are Canada's neoliberal economic policies, which have created conditions that make a growing number of people vulnerable to low income, vanishing public services and poor physical health. Silver also highlights the ways in which poverty is intimately connected to colonialism and racial and gender discrimination, and finds that the political and economic policies enacted by the Canadian government mainly serve a powerful minority, while producing a range of negative outcomes for the rest of us, especially the poor. Silver points out that the costs of poverty - relating to health care, crime, education and unemployment - are higher than the costs of solving poverty, and he lays out an achievable strategy for its dramatic reduction in Canada. When poverty is understood as resulting from political choices, its elimination requires putting pressure on governments to ensure that different choices are made.